Wichita’s North End has long been anchored by a deeply rooted Mexican-American community. The area is home to Evergreen Park — a 26.8-acre municipal park featuring a recreation complex with sports fields, a playground, a swimming pool, and three striking public murals that celebrate the community’s cultural heritage.

The youngest of this trio of Evergreen murals is the “Aztec Design/Tlaloc Mural,” which graces the east-facing front-entrance wall of the Evergreen Recreation Center. The mural focuses on Mesoamerican iconography, centering on Tlaloc, the Aztec deity associated with rain, water, and agriculture. It is a fitting echo of the agrarian and industrial roots of the historic North End worker communities that grew around the turn of the 20th century to support Wichita’s nearby rail yards, refineries, and meatpacking plants. 

Painted by Felipe Ortiz and Ivan Salazar, a Colombian art duo known as the Fresco Exchange, the mural is part of the Horizontes community murals project. Conceived and led by the Wichita-based artist Armando Minjarez, the initiative aims to connect neighborhoods through large-scale public art. The artwork renders traditional Aztec patterns and forms in crisp geometric detail, using dominant shades of feather-blue accented by yellow, green, purple, and red. The white, skull-like visage of Tlaloc dominates the work.

The mural was unveiled to the public in a ribbon-cutting ceremony in 2018 by Troy Houtman, then the city’s parks and recreation director, and Cindy Claycomb, the Wichita City Council member who represented District 6.

“We’re here today to officially unveil this new asset for District 6,” Claycomb said. “Studies have shown that public art has a ripple effect of promoting a healthy economy and a healthy social environment.” She went on to thank the artists and Minjarez for his role in the creation of the mural as the originator of the Horizontes project.

The center’s first mural — “Evergreen Recreation Center Mural” or simply Evergreen Mural No. 1 — is also replete with Aztec-inspired designs. Painted in 1995 by Ryan Drake and Cody Handlin, the artwork spans the facility’s north-facing facade. Drake, who later channeled his drafting skills into a career as a prominent regional tattoo artist, worked with Handlin to engage local youth apprentices in the painting process. The mural combines abstract geometries with trompe-l’oeil detailing that tricks the eye into perceiving depth — and a “real” child and man gazing into the distance — on an otherwise flat wall. The mural was repainted in 2020, restoring the work’s original warm red background and standout blue, yellow, and tan patterning.

The smaller mural on the south-facing concrete wall of the pool house — a short walk across a parking lot from the recreation center — was completed in 2014 as part of another collaborative public art endeavor organized by Minjarez, whose community initiatives consistently blend art with social advocacy.

“The pool house mural is a community mural,” he explains, adding that Joel Escarpita, now principal of Horace Mann Dual Language Magnet school in Wichita’s North End, led the mural-making, working under the banner of the ICT Army of Artists — a Wichita collective of creatives, activists, and artists dedicated to community enrichment through public art.

The “Evergreen Park Pool House Mural” swims in colorful geometric shapes reminiscent of the sun and its rays, as well as barns, silos, and fields. Like its fellow Evergreen murals, it offers viewers a tangible reflection on such intangible things as community identity, change, ancestry, resilience, and pride.

The Details

“Aztec Design/Tlaloc Mural” “Evergreen Recreation Center Mural” and “Evergreen Park Pool House Mural"

The Evergreen Recreation Center is located at 2700 N. Woodland in the El Pueblo neighborhood of North Wichita.

The park's hours are 9 a.m.-7 p.m. Monday through Thursday and 9 a.m.-5:30 p.m. Fridays.

Learn more on the Public Art Archive pages for the “Aztec Design/Tlaloc Mural,” the “Evergreen Recreation Center Mural,” and the “Evergreen Park Pool House Mural”. For more information on the Evergreen Recreation Center, visit its page on the City of Wichita's website.

Connie Kachel White is a writer and editor who has written about the arts in Wichita for going on three decades now. White, whose communications gigs range from book-editing to investigative reporting, is the founding and current editor of Wichita State University’s The Shocker magazine. More of her writing can be found online at theshockermagazine.com and shockerconnect.com.

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